4 ms·

When I worked at $HugeHealthCareCompany they had a ton of Z systems. Mainly used for data crunching on huge data warehouses.

blakesterz 11y ago
Ah, so is it something like $HugeHealthCareCompany can't send this kind of data to AWS or something because of HIPPA or whatever? Along those lines, I'd bet banks and finance places can't ship anything outside either. Makes more sense now :-)
- profeta 11y ago
  still doesn't answer why that platform though. 100k gets you lots and lots of servers with crypto hardware.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    I'd bet the problem is maintenance scaling. TCO of IBM mainframe + support + staff vs lots and lots of servers + staff + hardware staff (+ probably porting some legacy mainframe code to something distributed). If you're looking at a clean room build, it might not make sense often. But if you're starting with certain situations that accumulated over decades, maybe? I know a lot of the people I work with are gradually porting stuff off mainframe onto more modern hardware stacks, but Rome wasn't built in a day, etc etc.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Some quotes from the link scott_s provided: "The company's CEO said the total cost of ownership of the new mainframes is about 50% lower than that of the company's sprawling server farm." "However, mission-critical workloads that typically run on mainframes aren't a good match for public clouds, because mainframes are far more reliable. Public clouds such as Amazon's Amazon Web Services sometimes undergo unscheduled outages, and often the system must be rebooted in order to apply security patches or upgrades. For companies that require 100% uptime, public clouds simply aren't feasible."
- lostmypassword2 11y ago
  You can run HIPAA workloads on AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/

4 ms·

When I worked at $HugeHealthCareCompany they had a ton of Z systems. Mainly used for data crunching on huge data warehouses.

by SteveNuts 11y ago

blakesterz 11y ago
Ah, so is it something like $HugeHealthCareCompany can't send this kind of data to AWS or something because of HIPPA or whatever? Along those lines, I'd bet banks and finance places can't ship anything outside either. Makes more sense now :-)
- profeta 11y ago
  still doesn't answer why that platform though. 100k gets you lots and lots of servers with crypto hardware.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    I'd bet the problem is maintenance scaling. TCO of IBM mainframe + support + staff vs lots and lots of servers + staff + hardware staff (+ probably porting some legacy mainframe code to something distributed). If you're looking at a clean room build, it might not make sense often. But if you're starting with certain situations that accumulated over decades, maybe? I know a lot of the people I work with are gradually porting stuff off mainframe onto more modern hardware stacks, but Rome wasn't built in a day, etc etc.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Some quotes from the link scott_s provided: "The company's CEO said the total cost of ownership of the new mainframes is about 50% lower than that of the company's sprawling server farm." "However, mission-critical workloads that typically run on mainframes aren't a good match for public clouds, because mainframes are far more reliable. Public clouds such as Amazon's Amazon Web Services sometimes undergo unscheduled outages, and often the system must be rebooted in order to apply security patches or upgrades. For companies that require 100% uptime, public clouds simply aren't feasible."
- lostmypassword2 11y ago
  You can run HIPAA workloads on AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/